What you want to do may seem reasonable to you, but it's not the way
Outlook Express was written.

There are 2 ways that OE will delete message from the server.

1) Via a message rule with an action of Delete from Server. This just
downloads the message header, sees if the message meets the criteria,
and if so, tells the server to delete the message. The downloaded
message header is thrown away and the message body is never downloaded.
This is designed to get rid of message you never want to see and don't
want to waste time even downloading. Especially helpful for large
messages on a dial-up line

2) Tools, Accounts, Mail, Properties, Advanced, Leave a copy on the
server. This applies only to messages downloaded in their entirety. If
you don't check the option, then for every message you download OE sends
a delete command to the mail server. If you do check the option, then
OE doesn't send the delete command unless/until the message meets the
further criteria that you might enable there.

And those are you options in OE.

--

Mike - http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/techhelp.htm


"Frank D. Nicodem, Jr." wrote in message
...

"Bruce Hagen" wrote in message
...
A Delete it from server rule will not download the message and it will
also delete it from the server, even if you have Leave a copy of
messages on the server checked. Unfortunately, you're trying to have
your cake and eat it too.

Thanks for the tip. I'm just a bit baffled as to why what I'm trying
to do can't be done! It sure seems like there's no "conflict" in what
I want to accomplish. As I already mentioned, I have chosen to leave
E-mail on my server; and all I want to do is to download EVERYTHING --
and then *AFTER* that, I want to apply some message rules (such as
moving certain messages to other folders, automatically deleting
"spam", etc.). And one of the things I'd like to do is to "delete
from server" anything that I consider worthless to keep (even though
I'd still like to download it and check it out first).

So that seems like two totally separate and independent steps: 1)
retrieve my E-mail and let me evaluate it based on messages rules; and
2) under certain conditions, remove the original from the server --
but leave it on my E-mail client. That sure seems like it should be
do-able...

Some tips:
http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/tips/rules.htm

This was the most helpful article -- although, once again, I'm baffled
by WHY it works the way it does. For now, I guess I have to just bite
the bullet, and remove the Message Rule, let the E-mail download into
my Inbox folder, and then go back and manually delete messages from my
server that I don't want to keep. Sure sounds like an unnecessary
hassle.

But thanks for the help!
------------------------------------
Frank D. Nicodem., Jr.